Isotope Hydrology in the Mediterranean - IsoMed

Funded by BMBF (Projektträger DLR) within the European ERANET MED initiative, IsoMed is a cooperative project to efficiently manage sustainable water use in the Mediterranean region by providing an innovative method for water accounting with stable isotopes.

The aim is to estimate groundwater recharge. For this purpose, environmental isotope methods will be combined with a simple and widely applicable approach to measure water fluxes in soil. Often methods of strategic, ecological, and economic water accounting require data on environmental fluxes to be collected on-site and over time, and thus only provide data on the impact of new agricultural management practices after several years of measurement campaigns. IsoMed aims to solve this problem, leading to faster and better learning and adaptation processes in water management and also in agriculture.

The Technical University of Applied Science Lübeck and the Truebner GmbH are working on a combined system of water analysis and soil-physical measurement technology to precisely determine environmental flows. This will lead to an integrated procedure for easy water resource estimation. With the IsoMed project, environmental isotope methods are to be established in the practical application of sustainable water management.